Freakonomics: Parking is Hell - the hidden costs

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aknowledgeableperson
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Re: Freakonomics: Parking is Hell - the hidden costs

Post by aknowledgeableperson »

bobbyhawks wrote: When you combine all of those spaces, it shows the waste created for the number of jobs and residents we actually have.
You might look at it as waste but for the other 99% of us even if a space is unused most of the time it is still needed.

If there are private spaces for residential then those spaces are reserved for the occupants even if they are away on a two week vacation - it is their space especially if they purchased it as part of their condo. I cannot park a car there if I see that space open.

If I manage a building and have reserved spaces for tenants then they are entitled to those spaces. If the space open at 9:00 and I park a car there since the worker is to be there by 8:00 what do I do if the employee shows up at 9:10 and the garage is full?
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Re: Freakonomics: Parking is Hell - the hidden costs

Post by bobbyhawks »

flyingember wrote:crowdsourcing is harder than you make it out to be

you're basically proposing the creation of a downtown simulation system and the resulting data entry
companies do weeks worth of studies at great cost just to get single intersection data that's actually usable

just using google maps is going to have unusable data for 95% of spots because you're making huge assumptions about the use of the lot and each individual spot in it you need an on the ground effort with surveys to determine the type of individual in a statistically valid way

you need a system that allows for super flexible data entry. can you imagine how to enter a parking spot that only fills with a single event greater than 5000 people or if there's two events of 2000 or larger but only if on a weekday and only if a nearby office tower is 75% occupied? that's the level of complexity this gets into.
I'm not sure I follow your train of thought. Is knowing an approximate number of parking spaces, regardless of their type, not helpful information to those wanting to understand parking problems (or lack thereof) downtown? Obviously, everything deserves a context, but general numbers are often very useful.

Also, paying companies to do weeks worth of research is not crowdsourcing unless you are talking funding. Most crowdsourcing projects have nothing to do with funding. Think of Yelp or Wikipedia. I think you are overestimating the complexity and accuracy of what I am looking for. Basically, someone looks at the satellite map and says, between Grand and McGee, 16th and 17th Streets, there are ballpark 280 parking spaces. I work at such and such building, and they have 200 subsurface spaces. I could care less how full these lots are. The parking numbers are only ballpark estimates to compare with other ballpark numbers. For instance, how could anyone possibly know how many people came to the P&L area for Big 12 festivities. Those are estimates based on a number of non-scientific factors and estimates. But we will still discuss how 50k people (made up number), or whatever the estimate amounts to was good for the economy. There is no perfect way to get this number, but that does not mean that imperfect estimates are not still valuable. Otherwise, we can just put our blinders on and say that, because things are too complicated, we should not try to gain insight into them.
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Re: Freakonomics: Parking is Hell - the hidden costs

Post by flyingember »

bobbyhawks wrote: I'm not sure I follow your train of thought. Is knowing an approximate number of parking spaces, regardless of their type, not helpful information to those wanting to understand parking problems (or lack thereof) downtown? Obviously, everything deserves a context, but general numbers are often very useful.
this idea is overly simple and would give misleading results. the model being proposed would need to be super complex to give a helpful result.

How about a more useful idea

what we need to do is not a study of the total number of spaces downtown but to identify the parts of downtown that could add no more residents or jobs without adding spots and seeing if this is caused by a lack of spots currently or if there's plenty but they're not open to use by everyone. our core problem is the huge number tied up to a specific building.

Go back to the idea that the optimum parking always leaves a few spots empty in order to drive the perception people can park in the area of their destination. in other words, we *want* empty spots everywhere downtown at all times.


Let's look at the Pickwick Plaza building as a place this is a problem (933 McGee).
the many spots around are given up to some other use already. One garage is UMB only, another is tied to the old federal reserve, another is controlled by the federal courts, another by the Grand Ave temple, another by the courthouse residential building, another is potentially becoming the YMCA. There goes the majority of spots.

Look at the P&L tower. it's actually going to reduce the number of spots downtown in a busy area, firstly by changing the street dynamic of the block, secondly it's leasing current public spots in a garage and thirdly taking a surface lot off the market.
This area is all P&L, H&R Block or other similar commerical tower tie ups. There's one notable garage in the area and it's partially monthly only.

This is the reason for a citywide parking rules charge and tax regardless of structure type. To make it financially feasible to have parking only by turning it into a market driven commodity. Not a minimum parking code driven requirement. Parking maximums would come later in stages when it becomes doable to live *and* work across much of the city without needing a car. we're not there yet but there's people working towards this goal.

We're a long ways away, but long-term we need to have more buildings with parking below
We need to have blocks dedicated to parking structures 10 stories tall shared with everyone around the same height and no one has their own in building parking (there could be sky bridges)
we need to start layering. instead of a cap over i-670 let's sell air rights and have parking partially for the Sprint Center and partially for residential towers flanking it.

but all this density is going to require uncoupling as much parking from single use as we can and comprehensive rail transit for the rest
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FangKC
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Re: Freakonomics: Parking is Hell - the hidden costs

Post by FangKC »

The Power of Getting Paid Not to Park at Work

Subsidizing employer-paid parking clogs streets, boosts emissions and isn’t fair to commuters who can’t use this perk. But there’s an easy way to fix it.


https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... ow-organic
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Re: Freakonomics: Parking is Hell - the hidden costs

Post by FangKC »

Shifting gears: why US cities are falling out of love with the parking lot
...
Several cities across the country are now rushing doing the same, with Anchorage, Alaska, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Nashville, Tennessee, all recently loosening or scrapping requirements for developers to build new parking lots. “These parking minimums have helped kill cities,” said Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at Columbia Business School who accused political leaders of making downtowns “look like bombs hit them” by filling them with parking lots.
...
Cities such as Buffalo, New York, and Fayetteville, Arkansas, scaled back parking minimums a few years ago and have reported a surge in activity to transform previously derelict buildings into shops, apartments and restaurant. Developers previously saw as such work as unviable due to the requirement to build plots of car parking, in many cases several times larger than the building itself.
...
These stipulations have helped concrete over huge chunks of America – there are between three and six car parking spaces per car in the US, numbering up to two billion in total according to some estimates. In much of the US, more space is devoted to parking than housing – in Jackson, Wyoming, for example, parking spaces outnumber homes 27 to one, research has found.
...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... are_btn_tw
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